Last year I visited Le Broken Plate a few times, and wrote this glowing review of a night there. The location on Street 13 was almost hidden, but once inside the small and trendy restaurant you were warmly welcomed by the chef. It was always a memorable experience, and although never…

Cambodia is changing. On the way out are the wretched, the desperate, the runaways, alkies and deathpats. They don’t suit the new ‘developed’ status that the country now is hell-bent on portraying, albeit fairly unsuccessfully. Out with the beer guts proudly displayed protruding from wife-beater vests! Out with the flip-flops/sandles/thongs!…

I had some friends visiting from out of town for a week, and they wanted to have a fun and different experience from our other nights out in Phnom Penh. It was an easy choice to settle on Le Broken Plate, which is almost hidden on street 13 and certainly…

It was with slight trepidation that I went to Topaz a couple of weeks ago. On one hand it is consistently mentioned as one of Phnom Penh’s best restaurants; on the other hand a semicolon barely separates that statement from it being Phnom Penh’s most expensive restaurant. It was Wednesday,…

It’s disappointing when you go into a restaurant expecting to love it, and come away underwhelmed. That’s exactly what happened when I took two loved ones to Il Forno recently. Everything about the place, a relatively new upscale contemporary Italian restaurant which, after doing well in Siem Reap, opened recently…

Between the main expat hubs of BKK1 and Russian Market there is the Toul Sleng area – a neighbourhood with a diverse mix of Khmer, Vietnamese and barang inhabitants. There, you’ll find a handful of underrated and unknown restaurants and cafes. Mostly, they are family-run establishments serving homemade fare to ardent regulars.

In a city where food options abound and where restaurants and cafes open and close almost daily, it takes something special to keep doing the same thing year after year and remain successful. Focusing on developing a good formula that people like, and being renowned for consistent quality is a recipe for success. It’s something Phnom Penh institution Armand’s has been doing for years. And long may it continue.

It’s a constant refrain on both Khmer440 and pretty much any guidebook you care to mention: Khmer food really isn’t up to much, especially when compared to that of its neighbours in Thailand and Vietnam. It’s a terrible admission but in the two years or more I’ve been living in Phnom Penh, I’ve never bothered trying local cuisine.

Naomi Collett Ritz tries out a unique new restaurant in Siem Reap, based on Cambodia’s love of insects. The Bug Cafe features a menu of tarantula-stuffed donuts, ant-filled muffins and – her favourite – scorpions.